Proofpoint Wants Visibility Into How AI Really Works

Security teams are being asked to protect a workspace that now includes AI acting alongside people. Once AI has access to systems and data, securing the workflow becomes a very different animal.

That’s the backdrop for Proofpoint’s acquisition of Acuvity, a startup focused on AI security and governance. The deal is aimed at adding AI-native visibility, governance, and runtime protection to Proofpoint’s platform, with a specific focus on securing what the company calls the agentic workspace.

AI is now a core part of the workflow: how Proofpoint aims to secure it

Copilots and AI-driven tools are creeping into all corners of the business, from developers to legal teams to customer support. Work gets quicker, but data doesn’t always follow a clear, marked trail.

Shadow usage, sensitive information exposure, and compliance drift start to get much harder to pin down when AI is involved in the process itself. 

Add in emerging attack techniques aimed directly at AI systems, and the security picture gets way more complicated. 

Proofpoint is addressing that blip head-on by building security models that account for AI as part of the workflow, not an afterthought.

“AI agents are becoming active participants in the enterprise, accessing data, executing tasks and making decisions alongside people,” said Ryan Kalember, chief strategy officer at Proofpoint. “Securing this new model of work requires understanding human intent, agentic behavior and risk in real time.”

What Acuvity adds 

Acuvity fills in some of the gaps that show up once AI becomes part of those everyday workflows. Its technology helps teams see and control AI activity across endpoints, browsers, MCP servers, and locally installed tools like OpenClaw and Ollama.

Knowing that AI is present isn’t enough. Security teams need to dig in there and understand how it’s being used, where it connects to outside services, and how internal models are accessed. 

When AI starts influencing decisions, simple monitoring stops being enough, and complexity gets kicked up a notch.

By folding Acuvity into the mix, Proofpoint is positioning itself to cover collaboration security, data protection, and governance, and AI security in one spot. 

Why MSPs should care

For MSPs, especially those working with regulated customers, that approach cuts down on the aforementioned complexity when AI governance becomes part of ongoing service delivery.

“AI is fundamentally reshaping how work gets done and enterprises are overwhelmed by the pace of AI adoption and the complexity of securing it,” said Satyam Sinha, co-founder and CEO, Acuvity. “In an AI-accelerated world, intelligence is no longer confined to applications or infrastructure; it lives in interactions, decisions and autonomous agents acting on our behalf. Securing that future requires a new approach—one that governs how AI thinks, acts and learns in real time.”

As soon as AI is part of live systems, security becomes a matter of managing and maintaining it over time. This is work MSPs are already doing, just applied to a new set of tools. Easy, right?

MSPs are already grappling with what it means to govern AI in real customer environments, especially as questions around risk, access, and accountability pile up. More leaders across the channel are talking about AI governance as an operational responsibility, which lines up with why Proofpoint is leaning into visibility and control around AI agents.